At the University of Essex the Online Learning Group was established in January 2002. This group was to delve deeper into the features of Questionmark Perception and deliver exceptional functionality to departments and administrative sections across the University. Guinevere Glasfurd-Brown, the University’s Online Learning Officer, has worked closely with staff to establish a number of projects. These projects include online assessments and surveys of student and staff opinion, and use of the systems is growing rapidly. However, the University is going one step further. It will build an active interface between the student and the online self-assessments to enable the automatic scheduling of student assessments via the student portal.

Weekly online tests were devised by the department to provide a guide to the learning necessary at every stage of the course. Students would be tested on their understanding and application of course material and given instant feedback to help them subsequently to improve their scores. Depending on the scores achieved, the students would be advised as to whether they were required to attend the class that week. This would enable the tutors to target their attention and efforts more accurately towards those that needed the additional help.

Ceri Watkins of the Management Centre, Accounting, Finance and Management Department, commented, “Through this project, our aim is to improve the quality of the learning process and allow more effective resource utilisation for large group courses using Perception based online self-assessment and an online discussion forum (bulletin board) to facilitate both. The result has been a far more student-centric course structure and more active student engagement with the course material. This made possible an increase in the effectiveness of teaching contact time with a much clearer identification of the students’ learning requirements, what support is needed and which aspects of the course material require further exploration or elaboration.”

As a result of the project, AFM has reduced the level of academic resources required to teach the course, while enhancing the student learning experience. It has also simplified the administrative process of monitoring student progress and reduced the teaching room requirements, thus releasing scarce administrative and teaching resources for other uses.

The aim of the project is to inject a much greater sense of realism to the task. The students will be given options on which to base their decisions and the resulting scenarios will change depending on the choices they make. This is being developed specifically for AFM but it is hoped that it will provide the shell for other departments to use by inserting their own, course-specific content.

Peter Noakes of the Department of Electronic Systems Engineering comments, “As a result of last year’s trial staff are required to prepare at least one Formative Test for each of the undergraduate modules. Currently there are some 20 modules supported by nearly 45 tests, and this will double next term. The object of each test is to address the assessment of the type of knowledge that would be expected to be demonstrated by a student. Now, some questions are being developed to further challenge the students’ knowledge by evaluating their ability to apply knowledge to simple problem solving. Initial comments from some members of staff are enthusiastic about the value of the provision of formative testing in this way and they have taken it upon themselves to increase the number of tests for their particular module.”

Commenting on this latest project, Guinevere Glasfurd-Brown says, “This is a major project for us and it represents an exciting development in our online assessment capabilities. The ability to deliver the right assessments to students at the right time and to tailor the scheduling to meet individual needs rather than those of a group will be remarkable and is truly innovative, we believe. We will be linking this system to eight other institutions to enable them to produce live systems of their own and we will be sharing question banks with others to offer a pool of resources.”

“The introduction of online surveys of students has coincided happily with the introduction of the University’s student portal and this will enable the delivery of alerts and reminders to students to complete their survey questionnaires. It represents, in itself, a recognition of the fact that students are ready and willing to engage in more online transactions and activity in support of their experience of University life.”